Protecting our planet...

... one invader at a time.

Photo source LIFE archives, modified by Ryan Snieder.

Chariots of money

The commercialization and "professionalization" of the Olympics is a phenomenon that is widely recognized and apparently grudgingly accepted by the public.  The extent to which the athletes are subsidized by their corporate sponsors is best exemplified by snowboarder Shaun White, who has a private halfpipe built exclusively for him by his [name redacted] sponsor, located in a remote mountain site accessible only by helicopter.

When 60 Minutes reported on White's multimillion-dollar enterprise, the reporter/interviewer apparently found it convenient (or was required?) to address the camera while leaning on the corporate sponsor's logo.  They're all in this bed together...

For a modicum of relief, I turn to the curling teams, whose lifestyles are a bit closer to the old ideal of the amateur athlete.  The Star Tribune reported on their accommodations in Vancouver:

A brand-new penthouse suite, with a spectacular view, valued somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million.  For an athlete used to living in anonymity, though, a three-week stay in these digs offers a rare taste of the high life. The living room is bigger than the two-bedroom apartment that curlers John Shuster, Jason Smith and Jeff Isaacson share with three other guys in Duluth. Their lavish temporary home is all part of the fun of the Winter Games...

Many of the curlers are Minnesotans

...from places such as Bemidji and Chisholm and St. Michael, people with regular jobs and average physiques who earned the right to walk alongside global superstars at the Olympics.

U.S. men's coach Phill Drobnick of Duluth is a probation officer for St. Louis County. Shuster tends bar at the Duluth Curling Club and is a groundskeeper at a golf course in the summer. Nicholson works a 2-10 p.m. shift as an emergency-room nurse at a Bemidji hospital, and Isaacson is a substitute teacher...

They also have sponsors, whose backing allows them to "break even" re their Olympic expenses, and they gladly accept some perks, including custom-tailored clothing by Ralph Lauren and "duffel bags stuffed with gear."

That's probably as close to "amateur" athletes as one can find at the Olympics.

Cigarettes for weight loss

"This disturbing Lucky Strike ad is from 1931. After being reprimanded by the FTC for making claims that their cigarettes caused weight loss, Lucky Strike changed their ads to specify that you were supposed to smoke *instead* of eating, to keep from gaining weight."

And, of course, "everyone knows that heat purifies..."

Credit Clotho98, via Suddenly.

Licorne nuclear test

"This is the third picture of a series of the Licorne thermonuclear test in French Polynesia.  This is a scan of a (digitally restored) hardcopy of a picture taken by the French army which could be purchased in Tahiti at that time."

Credit to Pierre J.  Via Suddenly.  Click to biggify.

Nauli

A form of yoga requiring precise control of the rectus abdominis muscles.

Via Arbroath.

Boots

From a wonderful photoessay about Luna Park.  This was the Parisian one, not the one at Coney Island.

The Luna Park of Paris stood at the Maillot Gate. Its main attractions included the Niagara Falls, the so-called Russian (or American) mountains, the diabolic wheel, the Enchanted Palace. They were all faithfully copied also in the World Expo of Roubaix in 1911 whose photo documentation was left to us. In 1914 a great dance hall opened here as well under the direction of Duque from Brasil. Duque, a dentist had come to Paris as a traveling agent of medicine, but there he discovered that exotic dances were selling much better. This is how he started to teach “the true Brasilian tango” or „maxixe” which became the most popular dance of pre-war Paris.

Much more at the link.  What intrigues me is that little girls of the era wore such huge boots for everyday (or perhaps for dress-up).  One supposes they were considered sensible and fashionable.

Via Uncertain Times.

Source found for Faulkner's characters' names

A diary written in the mid-1800s by a plantation owner in Mississippi was apparently the source William Faulkner used for the names of characters in his novels.

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

More details at the New York Times.

Love speaks in many ways

Bruce Anderson, a farmer in Albert Lea, Minnesota used his manure spreader to create an arrow-pierced valentine half a mile wide.  His wife was duly impressed:

With a gasp, Beth said, “Now I’ve got my Valentine! That’s pretty cute.”  She said it was the biggest and most original Valentine she has received in her life.

Photo credit Darren Schone, via the Albert Lea Tribune.

The incredible thinness of Saturn's rings

When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn's ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro. Pictured above, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result. Saturn's thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn's upper atmosphere appear in gold. Since Saturn just passed its equinox, today the ring plane is pointed close to the Sun and the rings could not cast the high dark shadows seen across the top of this image, taken back in 2005. Moons appear as bumps in the rings.

This is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA.

Meet "augmented reality"

Here are two outstanding TED talks, presented by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, "an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces."

The upper video is from 2007, and the lower one from 2010.  TED talk audiences are quite sophisticated, so when they all go "Ooooohhh....." during his presentations, you know the technology is quite impressive.

A precedent "broken" in Casablanca

I watched part of Casablanca last night for the umpteenth time, and for the first time noticed a rather trivial error in the dialogue.  In an early cafe scene, Victor Laszlo has arrived with Ilsa and invites Rick (who never drinks with customers) to join them...

Laszlo: Won't you join us for a drink?
Renault: Oh no, Rick…
Rick: Thanks, I will.
Renault: Well … a precedent is being broken.

Later in the same scene, Renault uses the word improperly again:

Waiter: Your check, sir.
Rick: No, it's my party.
Renault: Another precedent gone. This has been a very interesting evening.

I'm not the first to have noticed this, and it in no way affects this wonderful movie, but it's the sort of thing that nitpickers and grammar Nazis love to encounter.

Photo via.

Remembering a feral cat

We didn't find him.  He found us.

He appeared on our front doorstep on a late summer day in 2008, probably sensing that there were other cats inside our home.  He had that "can-you-spare-a-bite-of-food-for-someone-who's-had-a-rough-life" expression on his face, but he appeared to be quite vigorously healthy - a large-bodied, powerful male with sleek, well-groomed fur.  He was, however, clearly feral, and not a stray.

Some homeless cats are "strays" - house-raised but subsequently abandoned when their family moves to a location that doesn't accept pets or is foreclosed out of their home.  In such situations, families often dump their pets in the suburbs or near farms where they tell themselves the cat can "fend for itself" (typically not likely for a house-reared pet).  Our home sits on the edge of a city, with cornfields next to the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, so we encounter stray cats (as well as foxes, turkeys, possum, and a variety of other wildlife).  Strays may be shy, but typically respond to a "here, kitty, kitty" call and can typically be redomesticated.

Feral cats are born outside of a human enviroment and thus have more primitive survival instincts and poor "social skills" in terms of interacting with people.  Based either on instinct or on previous bad experience they will flee from people.  They are at risk for a variety of ailments, including feline immunodeficiency virus, feline leukemia virus, and parasites.  We have taken several into our home, but it can be a real challenge if they are older than a small kitten.

We offered this fellow some food and fresh water, and he paid us regular visits through that autumn and subsequent winter, slogging through deep snow and then returning to some hidey-hole for shelter.   It was not until the spring of 2009 that we were able to successfully trap him to get him some veterinary care.  Lab tests at the vets showed that he was FIV+, precluding our adopting him, so we had him neutered and released him.

We thought he might not trust us enough to return, but after an interval he resumed his weekly visits.  Perhaps he had a round of sites to visit, or perhaps his refuge was so many miles away that he could only manage a return at that infrequent interval.

As last summer progressed, it was evident that his health was deteriorating.  The photo above, taken in late summer, shows him leaner and a bit less well-groomed.  By autumn he was clearly cachectic, and with another winter approaching, we decided another vet visit was necessary.  In October we trapped him again, and this time the vet found a large abdominal mass - a lymphoma - one of the expected sequelae of untreated FIV.  He had been anaesthetized for the exam that revealed the lymphoma, so we deemed it most humane to euthanize him while anesthetized.

We buried him in a sunny spot at the edge of the woods behind our home.  A cat that had been large and robust in his prime years now folded into a surprisingly small pillbug shape in the grave.  We put hyacinth bulbs around the body, then a layer of crocus bulbs near the surface, and finally sprinkled some catnip seed on the surface.  The large stone was placed, not as a memorial marker, but as a temporary and practical deterrent to predation by scavengers.

We've had a foot of snow on the ground for the last two months, but in a few weeks the melting will begin, and as the ground warms the new spring growth will be most welcome after a long, cold winter.  We don't "mourn" an expected death, but as the flowers emerge we will be pleasantly reminded of visits from a feral cat. 

Disrespecting "Honest Abe"

During this anniversary week of President Lincoln's birthday, many bloggers have offered hat tips to our sixteenth president.  I'll depart a bit from the norm to offer an excerpt with a different viewpoint:

By the time Lincoln ran for president, writes David Donald, he had become the master string puller in Illinois politics. He was what would today be called a "lobbyist" for the railroad corporations. In the late 1830s he led the effort to get the Illinois legislature to spend more than $10 million on "internal improvements" of roads and canals, none of which were ever finished; much of the money was stolen; and the taxpayers of Illinois were put deep into debt for many years...

As president, one of Lincoln’s very first acts was to call Congress into a special session in June of 1861 to begin work on the Pacific Railroad Bill, which would eventually result in the greatest spectacle of graft and corruption in American history up to that point (the Credit Mobilier scandal). Lincoln benefitted personally from this legislation which gave him, the president, the right to choose the eastern starting point of the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad. He chose Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he had recently purchased a large parcel of real estate that is known to this day as "Lincoln’s hill." Many of Lincoln’s Republican Party luminaries, from Thaddeus Stevens to Justin Morrill and Oakes Ames, and even General Sherman, accumulated fortunes through graft and patronage that was created by Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad Bill...

I found the essay at a libertarian website; it was written by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, who has authored a book about "dishonest Abe." I'm not in any way a Lincoln scholar, and don't know whether any biases have worked their way into the cited essay/book.  Perhaps Lincoln's behavior can be condoned as the "standard practice" of the times.  If someone out there can rebut the facts or cast the behavior in a more pleasing light, please do so.

If not, it's an interesting historical event that gives us a broader understanding of a famous man.

Images from the dawn of radiology

An exhibit at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art - Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 - looked at the influences of emerging technologies on scientists and artists.  One of the technologies presented wass the x-ray:

To the common people at the time, this was (and probably should remain) astonishing. Within three months, Keller said, DIY X-ray kits were available on the market. The rich and famous had their hands X-rayed, their skeletons draped in rings. Photographers, who had access to most of the tools needed to make the images, began to train this new form of light on just about anything that might be beautiful.

Photo from Wired, which has some other beautiful examples from the exhibition.

Stevie Nicks' biography

For ten years VH-1 presented biographies of musicians and rock groups in a series called "Behind the Music."  They departed from the typical pimping of the product to actually take serious looks at the artists and the influences on their work.  Embedded above is the first ten minutes of their program on Stevie Nicks; the rest of the program is accessible via links in the sidebar at the YouTube source.